Say Nothing’s empty empathy Victims become useful ciphers

Adapted from Patrick Radden Keefe’s award-winning book, Say Nothing is the latest dramatic recreation of the Northern Irish Troubles. Both book and show are centred around the abduction of Jean McConville, kidnapped and murdered by the IRA in 1972, after spuriously being accused of being an informer. Yet if the snatching itself, poignant and chilling, haunts the series from early on, it’s the voiceover that really grasps the programme’s ethos. “The thing about Irish people,” says a female voice, “we’ve been arguing over the same shite for 800 years.” It’s a cliché so squalid, so reductive of a 850-year-long colonial nightmare squeezed into a mere domestic squabble, that it perfectly encapsulates Say Nothing’s flaws.

Alienation is key. If you can make an individual, or a people, seem alien, savage, other, you can do all manner of things to them. This was a cornerstone of imperial policy and Northern Ireland, being one of its final remnants, is no exception. Catholics bore the brunt of “our wee apartheid state” as a character notes, and the resulting conflict affected every aspect of life. There are innumerable tales worth telling therein, and many voices who have longed to be heard. Say Nothing, despite appearances, is not one of those stories. It’s certainly about that place and those people but it’s immediately evident the camera’s eye is doing something else.

At its heart, in fact, this is a series very much like the Native American’s conception of the camera: it turns people into tropes, stealing their souls for entertainment and cash. Not, of course, that Say Nothing is alone here. On the contrary, the programme’s failures speak to a far wider malaise. We’re so wrapped up in contemporary worries, in our own way of seeing the universe, that we find it increasingly hard to burrow into the minds of others. So much that is claimed as “empathetic”, the boom in literary autofiction for instance, is indistinguishable from navel-gazing. So much political grandstanding is for our personal status, projected within our tribes, that when we do venture out into that vast wilderness called history, it’s all too easy for true crime to focus on perpetrators, on those strange men and women with a willingness to hurt. It doesn’t matter if the depictions condone or condemn. It’s theatre, provided you’re watching from the luxury of a safe distance. If these stories are engaging, they also do the courage and suffering of victims, who may be quiet and stoical, an unforgivable disservice.

Say Nothing dovetails the McConville saga with the story of one of her killers: Dolours Price. It follows the girl’s move towards the “armed struggle” with the attack on the civil rights march at Burntollet Bridge, which did a fine job of proving JFK’s dictum that those “who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”. It’s well-portrayed in Say Nothing, tense and gut-wrenchingly unfair; such instances (to say nothing of internment without trial or the mass murder of protesters during Bloody Sunday and the Ballymurphy Massacre) were crucial steps in the radicalisation of a young generation.

Certain qualities ring true: the glamour of working-class Northern Irish women is recognisable, as is the perpetual appealing, if exhausting, banter of the place. The brutality of nocturnal home invasions, courtesy of the police and army, is painfully accurate and atmospheric. As are the chase scenes, the inner-city bleakness, the casual torture sessions. The general dystopian feel is both true and an indictment of the successive Labour and Tory governments who imposed it upon their own citizens. But if the programme’s portrayal of grubby terraces and casual violence is plausible, the script slips almost instantly into heavy-handed schlock. After being assaulted by Unionist thugs at Burntollet, Dolours returns home to her parents. But rather than fear for their daughter, they instead launch into a facile political tirade. “Girls,” they ask, “why did you not fight back?”

The historically empty-headed opening line, in short, is how Say Nothing means to go on, with the whole programme suffused with a thick grime of anachronism. Just consider Dolours herself, gifted with pseudo-feminist slay queen moments totally implausible in the brutal and sexist Ulster of the Seventies. As befits the patronising orthodoxies of our time, she outwits uncouth lunkheaded men at every turn, every inch the IRA girl boss. When she’s finally accepted, it’s with the same dynamics as a coach spotting a wayward brilliant kid. As Dolours herself puts it: “We wanted to be doing what the boys were doing.”

And if that says something about Price herself, who was doubtless naïve in her early days as a paramilitary, it surely reveals much more about our infantilised platitudes about the past. The projection of one world onto the other results in a grotesque misalignment: follow your dreams, Say Nothing seems to suggest, and someday you too may lead someone to an unmarked grave or blow off the limbs of innocents.

In a sense, that gentle reflection of a bloodstained reality is both Say Nothing’s blessing and its curse. The cinematography, the music, the acting, the accents — it’s all gripping, rich, entertaining. And that’s precisely the problem. The medium is the message, and all the intricacies of the Troubles are condensed and transformed to attract and sustain a Disney+ streaming audience.

While Price is framed less as Countess Markievicz and more as rifle-wielding Mary Sue, the show is also careful to include something for fans of romance. Brendan “The Dark” Hughes, a leading IRA member and one of the architects of the Bloody Friday atrocity, is introduced in a gasp-inducing, fan-fluttering glimpse you’d expect of Mr Darcy — albeit in a Belfast riot not a ballroom. There are enough flirtations and sexual tensions here to hoover up Sally Rooney fans, as is obviously the point. Similarly, while it never descends to McDonagh-levels of paddywhackery, Say Nothing occasionally flirts with it — their greenhorn version of the once very real Kevin McKee, the early depictions of Dolours as a red-headed colleen in her Aran sweater handing out civil rights leaflets, the bank robbery dressed in nuns’ habits. The fact that “the nun with the gun” image was foregrounded and dominated the publicity around the series (alongside much more menacing images of women in balaclavas) shows how the North is viewed from outside and what it’s allowed to be. The primary Stage Irish modes have always been farce or wakes, buffoonery (hence the laboured “humanising” stories here of pet dogs and spud guns) or abject morbidity. That’s your choice. There’s little of the vast shifting territory in-between, where Northern Irish people exist most of the time, even during the Troubles. What a delight, though, to know that the Troubles were sexy after all.

Despite being viscerally nonfiction, with many characters still alive and the wounds still raw, everyone in Say Nothing is reduced to a kind of sanitised fiction. This is not Emily In Par-amilitaries, exactly, but feels far less distant than it should. That’s especially true when you factor in the programme’s tone. At times, Say Nothing felt uncomfortably like an adult Derry Girls. And while that show could slip movingly from comedy into pathos, it’s much harder to move the opposite way, and the scenes played for laughs feel cheap and jarring. At one point, Dolours is asked how much explosive she’s carrying. “Not much,” she quips. “About a car bomb’s worth.”

Then there’s what Say Nothing doesn’t mention. Of course, it’s impossible to cover everything in a conflict as complex as the Troubles. Yet there are so many moments, of human drama, that are treated as mere exposition dumps or ignored entirely: Bloody Sunday is one obvious example. Even worse is how so many pivotal figures — McGuinness and Thatcher, Stakeknife and Sands — are largely conspicuous by their absence. The British authorities are presented as stiff-upper-lip parodies, with only cursory suggestions of personality or family life. The irony is had they been presented in a more humanised and less automaton form, their use of state terror and coercion would have been all the more disturbing. Their gradual vanishing from the story is telling, however, especially given the immense power and damage MI5/Special Branch increasingly wielded over the Republican movement (and how little they protected their sources), a significant factor in the push towards the peace process.

MI5’s infiltration of the upper echelons of Sinn Fein has long been a rumour on Belfast and Derry streets but remains suspiciously taboo in the media. It calls into question the intentions of the original author, an ex-Pentagon staffer and thus no stranger to the security and intelligence services. This issue should be at the heart of this story — it’s one of the chief reasons there’s no truth and reconciliation process in Northern Ireland, given the shared secrets of this dirty war. More relevantly for Say Nothing, it has had a knock-on effect leading to the seizure of the Boston Tapes (a central plot device in the series) and the resulting chilling on any journalist seeking to uncover the bitter truths of the conflict and risking ruin in the process.

Say Nothing is eager to humanise people like Price, with Dolours given ample space to self-pityingly regret her violent life. And yet there’s one key person whose voice we never truly hear: Jean McConville. “You can say anything, Dolours,” the protagonist is told, and largely she gets to. But who was that other woman, that mother, the one treated like a largely wordless widow? What was her past, her dreams? We scarcely find out, probably because they assumed they wouldn’t have been entertaining to hear, even if quietly raising 10 kids in a Belfast tower block is the very definition of feminist heroism.

It hardly helps, of course, that McConville’s relatives have been so thoughtlessly treated by the show. The programme may claim it cares about ethics: “There’s a responsibility. I think that’s the price of admission, the price of trespassing into someone else’s world, be that an American writing about people in Belfast or a guy writing about young women. You have to get it right,” Radden Keefe said. “You have to earn the right to tell that story.” However the dead woman’s son-in-law says Disney never bothered contacting the family. The abduction scene, Seamus McKendry, argues, was “poorly portrayed…it should have shown the full horror of what happened. It didn’t and it left you to guess what had happened.” Michael McConville, Jean’s son, agrees. He refuses to accept the idea that it can be played as entertainment. “The portrayal of the execution and secret burial of my mother is horrendous,” Michael has stated, “and unless you have lived through it, you will never understand just how cruel it is.”

While McConville’s children are depicted in the series, they’ve been shockingly simplified to confirm the programme’s preconceptions. First, they’re portrayed as Rockwellian scamps. Then, in later life, they’re depicted as broken mourners. Both are one-dimensional caricatures, and the camera is careful to forget them during the troubled years they survived in care. To put it differently, then, the McConvilles are denied individuality and depth, reduced instead to passive bystanders in their own lives. They are emphatically, defiantly not, but watch Say Nothing and you come away with the sense that the only characters with any real identity are Dolours Price and the other killers.

It might be tempting, at this point, to look for someone to blame: the writers or producers or even Radden Keefe himself. The truth, though, is that Say Nothing is simply a symptom of a sickness in our culture. We, the audience, are complicit too. Over recent years, there’s been a pushback against the traditional “sexy dead woman on a mortuary slab” style of crime drama: think Twin Peaks or The Fall. In their place have come superlative works such as The Five by Hallie Rubenhold, books that nobly seek to restore the dignity and voices of female murder victims.

Yet these, in turn, are increasingly overshadowed by a new boom: of “true crime”, in podcasts and literature. A number of them (Dark Downeast, In the Dark, The Red Note, Bone Valley, Hands Off My Podcast: True Crime etc) have been commended for being appropriately weighty, victim-centred and justice-seeking. They remain exceptions, and even many of the superior true crime podcasts over-use suspenseful soundtracks and gothically overwrought retellings, all the tricks of fiction essentially undermining their moral force. Others, such as My Favourite Murder and Crime Junkie, seem to wallow in the salacious, speaking of terrible things in seemingly frivolous tones and operating merch stores on the side. Instead, they do us a favour by revealing that deep down, the primary function of the true crime industry is not empathy with victims. True crime’s obsession with compassion is a self-flattering falsehood, born of cynicism and therapy-speak. Nor is this surprising. The true crime industry, after all, is just that: an industry.

At the same time, it’s one focused on the intoxicating idea of trespass, of illicitly examining the psyche of murderers. That’s clear when you consider the attention given to perpetrators, their beliefs and motivations, compared with those of victims. Similarly, the Price sisters and Brendan Hughes are given plentiful space to express themselves and justify their crimes. They could have scarcely imagined this would one day be broadcast for public pleasure.

And what of the victims? They’re treated as nobodies, as mere ciphers in favour of murky and charismatic criminals. That unnatural distancing was needed to turn their trauma into entertainment for us, in the same way we watch horror films  for comfort. As the harrowing story of the McConville children so vividly shows, this approach nonetheless leaves behind the wreckage of trauma, soon conveniently forgotten.

There are, to be fair, more sensitive paths to tread. If, after all, a writer acknowledges that there’s an inevitable parasitic and sensationalist element to non-fiction, and refuses to fool themselves that they’re empaths burdened with haloes, they may be able to mitigate its worst effects. More to the point, there are documentary filmmakers who consult those involved, cultivate ethical relations with those who are in the know, and crucially listen, a fraught process but a necessary one to even begin conveying the truth and avoid retraumatising generations. Without this, empathy is a pretext, even an alibi, carelessness wrapped in the language of care. What is really happening is that sordid crimes are being made palatable and commercial.

In that sense, at least, Say Nothing succeeds in portraying the Troubles as they actually occurred. The truth, unstated by the show and by Northern Irish society at large, is that the Good Friday Agreement was facilitated by ignoring victims and their families. They paid the price for our peace, with killers released early or heralded as peacemakers, the atrocities of all parties filed away and forgotten. And now, all that’s left is entertainment. “It’s just a lot of theatre,” the Gerry Adams character agrees: except for those who do not have the luxury of being casual spectators. Say Nothing says many things, the most important of which it says despite itself. The moment for us to address these questions, these cruelties, has long since passed — if not the suffering. Until we face these difficult questions and realities, we will always be vulnerable to the soul-stealing that follows.